Amazing Gallery of Games Consoles as Buildings

What if video-game consoles were bigger? Not just retro-70s-technology bigger, but make-Godilla-stop-and-take-notice bigger? Building-sized bigger, in fact?

Then they’d look like these fantastic fantasy concoctions from photographer Joseph Ford and 3D artist Antoine Mairot. Made for the French-language Amusement magazine, these giant consoles rise up in monolithic communist concrete and capitalist glass-and-steel.

They’re wonderful. While the PS3 (surely not far off the real size) rearing up in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz fits right into the high-rise district around it, my favorite has to be the tank-like NES pictured above. Its squat, menacing form stares out over an empty wasteland. I can’t tell if it, too, is in Berlin, but it could almost be a genuine piece of East German architecture from the time before the Wall fell.

The third image, of the Nintendo DS, is wonderfully constructed but a little too Doctor Who for me: it’s fun, and looks good to begin with, but if you give it a second’s thought the illusion evaporates and the impossible reality is revealed. I love that the D-Pad looks like a helicopter landing-pad, though.